. welcome to "our world with black enterprise. "i'm your host, marc lamond hill. >> the death of bin laden marks the host significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat al qaeda. >> what's what's going on in "our world" starting now. joining me to discuss the rapidly shifting political tides and how it might impact you are mark moreale of the national

urban league, dr. marty merry of princeton university and author of the new book "more beautiful and more terrible, the embrace and transcendence of racial inequality in the united states" and david webb, coparty of the tea party 365. this is an interesting moment. ei are a little bit beyond this historical webb where barack obama comes on television and announces osama bin laden has been killed. >> the united states has conducted an operation that killed osama bin laden, the leader of al qaeda, and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands. >> i saw celebration in the streets. i saw democrats and republicans all in agreement. does this signify a new political moment? >> obama got osama and what it does, it's a bit of a return to what the mood of the country was after 9/11, when i think there was a unifying sense and a unifying force that the tragedy created that and there's a bit of closure, particularly for the

9/11 families with osama bin laden being killed by those navy s.e.a.l.s in pakistan so i do think -- the question is how long will it last and will it be only momentary or is it a sense that the nation is better off if we're unified in purpose. >> david, i mean, you are a conservative, i mean -- >> um-hum. >> i haven't heard a conservative yet deny this was the right mission. are there any critiques of obama's approach? >> look, it's a unifying thing, i agree with you. there are issues outside of race, outside of politics. osama bin laden's a murderer, a mass murderer, who is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands across the world, and thousands of americans. i don't think you'll find any rational person saying this was not the right thing to do. >> hmm. i see you chomping at the bit already, please. >> right, this is a unifying moment. i think it does provide some closure, but i am concerned that

there may be a revival of some of the kind of islamaphobia and hostility towards, to the muslim world, towards the arab world that we saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and so in this moment, i keep hoping that people remember the kind of, the wave of revolutions that we saw in the middle east and africa and how we identified with people in that moment and the sort of universal desire for freedom and equult that we saw that exists across borders that transformed our image in that part of the world. in the midst of that i want us to keep that vision of the middle east in mind. >> i guess that's what worries me sometimes when we close ranks around something as a nation sometimes we do that at the exclusion of somebody we consider the other, whether it's an arab, muslim or mexican immigrant. sometimes our fears and the things that bring us together are very dangerous, you know, david? >> i understand and i agree with that but in this case and i have followed the news reports very

closely on this, i have yet to see any back lash against muslims. i mean both presidents obama and bush made it clear this was not a war on islam, that as a matter of fact both have made statements to the fact that osama bin laden does not reflect the muslim faith but is an aberration, which is what he is or was. >> but i think it's also got to be said and you know, these are not moments when we should rush to engage in hard political analysis, but i do think that this demonstrated a quality about president obama, in effect he spoke or walked softly and he carried a big stick. this operation was in the planning stages for months and months and months, but at the end of the day, the person that had to make the decision to sign the order was barack obama, and so i want to certainly give the president credit for a great sense of determination, and the way indeed in by it was handled and i don't think that ought to

dominate the discussion but it certainly has to be said because many people questioned whether the president had the determination to make these sort of calls. i think he demonstrated that not only he did but he succeeded. let's remember, jimmy carter sought an intervention to free the hostages. it did not work. ronald reagan sought a missile strike to take out gadhafi many years ago. bill clinton had an unsuccessful intervention at the branch davidian compound. barack obama has succeeded in undertaking a highly risky but very important effort. >> shortly after taking office i directed leanne pa nnetta the director of the cia to make the killing or capture of bin laden the top priority of our war against al qaeda even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle and defeat his network. >> what he basically did he is answered the question and the question has been answered and

the debate should be over. we'll be right back. >> "our warld with black enterprise" is brought to you by chevrolet. that one day on the red hills of georgi the sons of form slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. i have a dream today! [ male announcer chevrolet is honored to celebrate the unveiling of the washiton, d.c., martin luther king jr. memorial. take your seat at the table on august 28th. [ female announcer real fruit... means real fruit smoothies from mccafé. real delicious and made just for you. ♪ what?! -match it! -match it! -match it!

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welcome back. we're here with dr. perry, mark moreale and david webb. we're talking about the policy issues, foreign policy around afghanistan, around osama bin laden in particular.

i want to shift gears a little bit. david you had a comment you ke. >> yeah i want to add to something mark said. i understand and there are the political credits due to the president. after all the decision is his, but this has been an ongoing professional process, and whether it was jimmy carter, bill clinton, reagan, bush or whatever, all presidents have to deal with the process that happens to take an action. it's not just he gets the credit or the blame for the success or the failure, but we shouldn't ignore the fact that there are professionals that have spent almost a decade tracking osama bin laden. >> i think one of the challenges people accused obama of not having been aggressive enough on terror, he wasn't following the bush plan. >> most of his policies have followed exactly what came out of the bush administration with the war on terror. he's followed the war time policy which comes from the professionals. >> does that frustrate you at all? >> no, the president has done what he said he would do. he always supported the war in afghanistan. he said as a candidate that he

would double up, redouble our efforts, win the war in afghanistan and that he would get osama bin laden. he took a different tack in iraq where he said i disagree with the iraq war and i'm going to wind thus down out of that fwar. it's important to analyze this in a promises made, promises kept analysis, and i sort of look at what the president has undertaken as just fulfilling what he said he would do as a candidate. >> mark you need to be accurate about this, though, because the plan was, the plan to wind down the iraq war was negotiated between joseph brennan and nuri al maliki during the bush administration. this is the problem i have with separating policy. >> we give george bush some credit. >> no, but this is about being accurate. this plan was in place before barack obama was president. it was part of the military decision and this is why i said

we cannot just include political without including the process. >> but i'm not going to let you sit here and diminish the president's contribution. >> i'm not trying to diminish it. i'm adding to the fact it needs to be fully correct. >> let the professionals, there is' no doubt the military but under the constitution the president is the commander in chief of the military. and so he has to make the ultimate decisions and so i, you know, will offer credit but what this is really all about is too many people sought to diminish barack obama's foreign policy credentials, sought to diminish whether he was committed to taking out osama bin laden, so what he basically did is he answered the question and the question has been answered and the debate should be over. >> this part of the conversation certainly because i have to change gears a little bit. one of the things mark mentioned earlier was the idea of promises kept, he made promises and kept

them. amani, my concern and the concern of many people is he hasn't made so many promises to black people. what do you say to that? >> i don't take a position he has to make responsibilities to black people because we voted for him in overwhelming numbers. the reality is we have crises in black america, crisis in terms of health care, imprisonment, education, on and on employment, right, so we do need those crises addressed in congress, state government so it's a mu i multitier critique and it has to be organized in order to get that response, so yes, i do have that critique of the president but not exclusively. >> every president has a responsibility to the citizenry of this nation and i think particularly the most vulnerable citizens to i give the president

credit, he's stepped up in civil rights laws, made a lot of important appointments to the courts, his executives helped to get the nation out of a ditch but the unfinished business of more targeted focus on those areas where the unemployment rate is the highest so my encouragement to the president has been to articulate an urban policy, to articulate a policy that is more focused on those areas -- >> in urban policy an interesting idea. i want to push back to you marty before david. seems like he can't say our names, even president clinton, george bush could say i have an agenda for black people, middle class, gay and lesbian brothers, jewish brothers and cyst sisters. this president as a black president doesn't seem to say our name. why is that? >> i don't know why that is, but it is the case that there are race-specific issues. it's not simply that, it's not simply that black people are disproportionately poor although they are but even if you control

for class the discrimination that african-americans experience is greater in consumer purchases, in health care, in education, i mean in every area we have evidence that shows there is active discrimination even when circumstances are identical. >> amari some of the issues, economic job issues, housing, there are issues around racism structurally you talk about in your book, white person versus black person. >> because we see that people practice racial inequality, i don't use racism but we see people disadvantaged on the basis of race in employment, in housing, in health care and education, it's not simply because black people are more likely to be poor, more likely in areas of concentrated poverty that we get limited access, people disadvantaged when you go to the doctor you're less likely to get nessary tests if you're black. so we need to have some policy

initiatives that begin to help us control our practices in society so that black people are not systematically disadvantaged. >> how do we enforce it? how do we create a context where people can go to the doctor and get the necessary tests or someone can get the proper medicine? >> this is a great question. one of the things they attempted to do in medicine and people do in various fields is to figure out how to address standards of care so that there's not enough, there's not a lot of discretion that allows people to disadvantage on the basis of race, so there are just norms that you have to follow through and you can't -- so some of it is just controlling processes. we also know that the more people know that something is the source of racial inequality, the better they actually are at controlling it so we do better when we talk about race. people have this fiction that we do worse when we talk about. we do better. race matters in every single one of the arenas. >> does race matter? >> race will always be a factor in some way, ethnicity if you will. where i find agreement with all

of you especially is in the fact that we need to focus on poor, wealth growth. the perception in this country is that if you say are there more poor black people than anybody else in this country, yes there are. wrong. we're 12% of the population. there are more poor white people. focus should be on economic opportunity and economic growth. now within the black community, one of the failures in the black community has been its own empowerment, its own self-empowerment and taking advantage of what's available to it. you're not going to get 400 years of reversal immediately in decades, because you don't have the basis from whether it's industrialization or financial basis for it, but it's time to take care of your own empowerment and as for the point of why the president can't say black my thought is he doesn't want to be perceived as playing only to black people because that's political suicide because

then your detractors will go after you. >> hang on, when we come back we'll talk about the big birth certificate controversy. >> even when you're the president of the united states you still experience this kind of questioning. >> "our world" with black enterprise is brought to you by state farm, find an agent or get a quote at statefarm.com. ♪ oh hey jake! my car got jacked. i got it. ladies! [ chuckles guess you're walking. you got those figures for me yet? ♪ like a good neighbor, state farm is there ♪ with an intern! nice work. casual wednesdays! casual wednesdays! [ both laugh what?! [ male announcer state farm agents are there when you need them.

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closed captioning for "our world" is brought to you by -- welcome back. we're still here with mark moreal, dr. amari perry and david webb. we're talking about the president and this birth certificate issue. for the last two years, three years, before he was president people were raising questions about the president's citizenship. since he's been elected president the questions lingered to the point where he had to show the long birth certificate, the full birth certificate, the hawaiian certificate. >> it's absurd, disingenuous. those who veiled it have racism, it's a weapon of mass distraction when we ought to be talking about jobs, we ought to

be talking about schools, we ought to be talking about what we need for the future of this nation. it's become a side show. >> no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the donald and that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like did we fake the moon landing. what really happened in roswell? and where are biggie and tupac? >> i'm saying that because you remember tupac? you are where they are. >> let me say this. there are for every president if we go back in history fringe elements that go after them on something, all right, whether it's bush monkey picture, reagan this, clinton this whatever. the birthers are out there on the fringes. the one thing i'm happy about -- >> you don't question the question's citizenship.

>> i don't question the president's citizenship but it's now frankly except for the extreme elements off the table. the one good thing about donald trump and this whole whatever did, it brought it out and now it's been shown and now we can get back to the policies because i'm focused on the policies. as far as the extreme elements i have a hard time calling people racist and throwing that word around easily unless there's specific action that tells me they're a racist. that's a problem i have with not just the white/black dynamic but any dynamic. >> i think it was patently offensive and i agree it was absurd, ridiculous, clearly it was established long ago that he's a citizen and it smacked of racism because it's consistent with this idea that we're always being questioned, right, that our legitimacy, skill, along with the attacks on his academic record that were completely hi

dynamic that that creates is kind of collective sense of frustration and humiliation, even when you're the president of the united states, you still experience this kind of questioning, and so for me it was infuriating but also revealed about the persistence of racism. >> this infurgs should have happened in may of 2000 with the boston globe and "the washington post" and bush and the gores grades which were actually put out by them -- >> when they were running for president. >> when they were running, and after and also same thing with john kerry and the boston globe in 2005 when they obtained transcripts and put them out, confidential transcripts. my point with that is you cannot continue to say this is a one-off and one only. >> no, but the request for transcripts, requests not simply for transcripts, he said that he assumed that he was an inferior

studen studen student,notwithstanding the fact he went to harvard law. there's no question he was -- >> when you have someone a self-proclaimed billionaire. >> donald trump. >> well-known businessperson, someone that had a degree of respect, has a top television show lending his name to a campaign and leveraging the media like a p.t. barnum, we don't need side shows, we don't need political entertainment, it's nice to laugh at for a minute or two but when it dominates the air waves, it takes away from what i believe most people in this nation expect of in public discourse. mark moreal, dr. amani perry thank you for being here. if you have a particular topic e-mail us at ourworld@blackenterprise.com. stay with us. we'll be right back. when i say mango, you say pineapple! mango! [ crowd neapple! mango! [ crowd pineapple! hey, when i say pineapple, you say mango!

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